I like the analogy. Faith is like that trust thing where you fall back hoping somebody is going to catch you, BUT WITHOUT FIRST CHECKING TO SEE IF ANYBODY IS THERE AT ALL. Instead, you rely on the word of someone who never met you that anybody ever happen to fall backward, there is a Someone who will catch them.
I don't personally find that sort of assurance very reliable. Especially when I have seen so many people fall flat on their backs and hit their heads.
I don't think you're stupid. I think you have been TRAINED NOT TO THINK. There's a difference. Your kind of blindness requires a kind of mental disciple. You have been conditioned to respond to everything positive as a gift from God and blame every bad thing on something else. You have been trained not to ask for proof or at least solid rationale for believing the things that you are taught to have faith about. If that discipline ever breaks, your faith will waver and you will have a hard time regaining it.
I should know. I had that kind of disciple, instilled by years of early training. But I work in a profession where I had to be trained to think critically, to challenge my own assumptions, to look behind the curtain. And the mental discipline of my faith could not withstand it.
I wavered. Then I broke. Then I admitted what I had suppressed for years: there was and is no reliable evidence for Christianity, no reason to believe any of it at all. It's all just as made up as any of the false religions I never believed in. If you look behind the curtain, it's all just a man pulling levers. That is, the purveyors of faith, who make their living by keeping the believers in the pews. It doesn't even matter whether those guys believe. They're selling nonsense.
I could go on in detail on what exactly about Christianity makes it an untenable system of belief. But that's beside the point. Nobody should accept anything so at odds with normal reality without very convincing proof. Not me and not you.
So don't tell me that my belief system is flawed. My system is based on believing what my senses and my rational mind tell me, and what other rational minds have determined from the evidence of their senses and their scientific instruments. That's not flawed. That's what we have brains for.
Your system is based on believing what you are told. That's adequate for children, but not for adults, especially not when what you are told is bizarre stories about God moving mountains or corpses coming back to life after they've been dead and buried for a couple of days.
